Drawing Solar Power from Light that is Unseen Thanks to Nanoparticle

Scientists from around the world working under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have released a study that shows how nanoparticles can be used to enable solar panels to derive energy from light that was previously not accessible by solar cell technology.

An international team of scientists has demonstrated a breakthrough in the design and function of nanoparticles that could make solar panels more efficient by converting light usually missed by solar cells into usable energy.

The team, led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), demonstrated how coating tiny particles with organic dyes greatly enhances their ability to capture near-infrared light and to reemit the light in the visible light spectrum, which could also be useful for biological imaging.

Once they understood the mechanism that enables the dyes on nanoparticles to function as antennas to gather a broad range of light, they successfully reengineered the nanoparticles to further amplify the particles’ light-converting properties. Their study was published online April 23 in Nature Photonics.

“These organic dyes capture broad swaths of near-infrared light,” said Bruce Cohen, a scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry who helped to lead the study along with Molecular Foundry scientists P. James Schuck (now at Columbia University), and Emory Chan. The Molecular Foundry is a nanoscience research center.

“Since the near-infrared wavelengths of light are often unused in solar technologies that focus on visible light,” Cohen added, “and these dye-sensitized nanoparticles efficiently convert near-infrared light to visible light, they raise the possibility of capturing a good portion of the solar spectrum that otherwise goes to waste, and integrating it into existing solar technologies.”

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